Editor’s Note: Here at the Semantic Web Blog we’ve done a lot of coverage of the personalized news mag app space. That includes some in-depth looks into Zite, acquired by CNN in August, such as this article. Most recently, we brought you news of Zite’s iPhone app.

Today, over at Zite’s blog, the company today will run a piece entitled Zite: Under the Hood. It should be of interest to anyone who wants more details about how its technology operates. It goes like this:

Zite: Under the Hood

If you’re already a Zite user, you’ve experienced the delivery of personalized content that is updated every time you open the app. To make that transparent and easy for you, takes a lot of effort. The Zite team brings together decades of software development in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language technologies, and more than six years of product development, to blend and tune the experience for you. In short, Zite works by:

• mining content from your social web
• modeling that content
• modeling the community that interacts with it
• modeling your interests
• matching your interests to the content and your community, to help you discover content you’ll want to see.

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StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer,  and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

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Zite, the personalized news magazine app for the iPad, adds an iPhone version of its application to the lineup today. The company, which we wrote about here and which was acquired this summer by CNN, has focused on making the semantically-intelligent app fit the smaller-size format of the smartphone, with one-thumb navigation, vertical story and left-to-right category view flow, and a focus on the facts of story name, title and source , rather than snippets, as starter views.

CEO Mark Johnson says a prerequisite for the iPhone app was its release of Sybil technology in late October, which allowed Zite to have multiple profiles that adapt to the reader’s preference. This made it possible to share the Zite app on a family’s sole iPad without messing up individuals’ preferences. It comes in handy for the new smartphone app because, “if you did all this work on your iPad training this very intelligent AI, you don’t want to lose that when you go to the iPhone,” Johnson says.

Johnson expects the iPhone app to appeal to existing iPad users. “Personalization is really addictive. Once you have it one place, you want it everywhere,” he says

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Semantic tech innovator Evri has launched a topic-based news discovery app for the iPad: “Evri says its iPad app is the first to offer topic-based news discovery, while competitors like Pulse and Flipboard focus more on collecting stories from specific news sources or your social networks… The iPad app makes finding interesting stories and trending topics easy, thanks to a technology that distills around 2.5 million topics from over 15,000 sources. It’s also easy to personalize, since the iPad app can connect to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Evri app will also recommend stories to you based on what you’ve read.” Read more

We sat down with Mike Tung, CEO of Diffbot to learn more about this innovative technology that takes a different approach to deriving meaning from web pages.

SemanticWeb.com: What is Diffbot?
Mike Tung: Diffbot is a technology that allows software applications to interpret web pages the way human beings do–visually.  We offer an API to developers that lets them visually extract semantic information from web pages depending on the page type.  We’ve observed that the entire web can be classified into roughly 30 structural page types and have trained our visual extraction algorithm on two of those page types so far–frontpage and article pages.

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You’ve just been semanticized. Or, you might be if you’re a member of an organization that subscribes to Dow Jones Factiva. The information service known for the semantic tools it applies to its content, including its company, industry, region, and subject taxonomies, in order to surface relevant information in searches, sees an opportunity to increase its service’s value by considering the people part of the search picture.

“An important aspect of filtering is the human aspect,” says Greg Merkle, Factiva’s VP of Product Strategy & Design. “There are those who consume information and those who package and curate it. So we’ve developed a series of personas to understand the ecosystem of information inside the enterprise – how users connect, how they do their work, and so on.”

As Factiva aims to be more about awareness and monitoring vs. a pure research and search tool, it’s important for it to have insight into the meaning of individuals’ specific user roles, to know what they do at a deeper and more meaninful level than the general classification of them as information professionals or end users or, more recently, corporate knowledge worker.

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Zite CEO Mark Johnson says he’s flattered by the rumors this week of a multi-million dollar CNN acquisition. He won’t comment on them, of course, but he is flattered.

What he will say is that there’s a reason such talk gets started around intelligent, personalized news apps. “Whether a company chooses to partner with a larger company to distribute their technology or go on their own, we are solving a basic consumer need,” Johnson says. The iPad-oriented Zite, which has its semantic groundings in the Worio (the catchier handle for Web of Research Iteration One) contextual discovery engine plug-in that works alongside a user’s search engine, benefits from the six years of work behind that system in personalizing search results, he says.

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eBooks are cool, but they could get even cooler with EPUB3, the next version of the widely adopted distribution and interchange format for digital books (well, except for Amazon). The latest version of the standard could make it easier for publishers to more flexibly represent their offerings to digital book retailers, and add a lot of excitement to the eBook reading experience, too.

EPUB3 is based on HTML 5 and was proposed to include RDFa. RDFa is in question for eBook metadata now, however, though there is still the possibility to embed RDF/OWL within eBook content. (Membership comments on EPUB3 are due in by Aug. 22). EPUB 3 requires the same three metadata elements as EPUB 2, which are dc:identifier, dc:title, and dc:language, while also permitting many more. “We left it open to using something like RDFa so you can put in what you need to,” says Eric Freese, solutions architect at digital publishing solutions vendor Aptara. That could include, for example, using the PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) XML metadata vocabulary for managing and aggregating publishing content, or ONIX metadata for representing and communicating book industry product information.

However the RDFa question fares, one thing that is increasingly clear to publishers that have done any looking at all into eBooks, Freese says, is that “it doesn’t take long before they get hit in the face with the metadata problem. And as more time goes by there are fewer and fewer publishers who haven’t thought about doing eBooks.”

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The Semantic Web Blog mentioned here, there is speculation that the Siri intelligent personal digital assistant technology may come to light in Apple’s fall iOS 5 release. Which is all well and good for users on Apple’s mobile platforms, but myBantu founder and vice president of products and strategy Bharath Yadla sees an opportunity to bring personalized recommendations for entertainment to a wider swath of the populace. The iPhone and Android version of its application, to join its web and Facebook applications. officially launch next week.

“We see absolutely a great opportunity with other platforms from a mobile standpoint,” he says. “And when you leverage the application on Facebook, that is a predominant presence.”

What users are leveraging in this intelligent assistant is its ActiveRelevance platform for providing relevant and personalized recommendations based on their profiles and queries. The platform leverages both artificial intelligence and social relevance, assessing some nine dimensions, including personal interests, proximity of choices, popularity, and peer influence, in order to deliver a handful or two of results. The social relevance comes by way of crowd-sourcing recommendations from sites such as OpenTable and Rotton Tomatoes, friends on social networking platforms, and the output of search as well as semantic engines. Users can enter their requirements in natural language, such as top romantic restaurant nearby, for the ActiveRelevance engine to parse intent and come to some conclusions.

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If the future of web content is mobile, so too then goes the future of advertising. Mobile ad network Mobile Theory and ad technology company NetSeer want to be there for that future.

The two have teamed up with the goal of mobilizing NetSeer’s concept-based advertising, which uses algorithms to pinpoint relevant and related concepts based on the subject matter in a particular article, in the service of contextual ad delivery. On a mobile site for investing, NetSeer’s ConceptLinks might display related topics like “Exchange Traded Funds” and “Portfolio Management,” which are monetized links for the publisher, the company says. NetSeer says it already has several hundred publishers using its platform on the web.

Mobile Theory does the work of making an ad unit appear and function properly in a mobile environment. CEO Scott Swanson says that takes some work. On mobile platforms smaller, screen sizes, different screen ratios, ability for users to change orientations, and those users’ desire not to click on an ad and land somewhere else all must be considered. “We had to develop an ad unit that works completely different in mobile, to be faster, more simple, and more immediate than we do in online,” he says.

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